Tag Archives: Confucius Institute

“The verdant Hawai‘i Islands in their mid-Pacific location have for over two centuries played a siren song to travelers from the greatest land mass in East Asia. The earliest Chinese emigrants landed on Hawai‘i’s shores beginning in 1789, and built the first wooden structures around Honolulu harbor that are the forerunners of the business district of modern Honolulu. In 1879, a 13-year old Chinese boy landed on these same shores, and absorbed enough modern Western (Christian) education in Honolulu’s schools to topple the religious altars in his own home, and decades later, as Sun Yatsen, helped overthrow an empire to establish a democracy in his homeland.”

Given the prominence of these early connections between Hawai‘i and the Chinese, and the composition of Hawai‘i’s population, it is not surprising that by 1930 UH ranked third among U.S.colleges and universities in the number of Asia-related courses it offered. Today, the university’s Center for Chinese Studies housed within the School of Pacific and Asian Studies, is the largest such research and training center outside of Asia.

The Confucius Institute at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa is a part of the university’s Center for Chinese Studies. Funded by the Confucius Institute Headquarters (Hanban) of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, it is operated jointly by UH Mānoa and the Beijing Foreign Studies University. It was established on November 6, 2006, and tasked with responding to local and national needs in promoting education about Chinese language and culture,